erudite_talesfandomcom-20200214-history
Talk:Invasion of Leir/@comment-1743498-20170117224433/@comment-5870856-20170119011253
Hoo boy... "I think Xeng's and Leir's technology actually match up pretty closely to Segara's as this was a time where you could use magic to do just about anything. Leir has the capacity for terraforming (pretty much earthbending on a continental level) and Xeng is full of magitek contraptions everywhere. A large majority of articles here actually refer to the old draft's lore (like this one here). Ignoring my recent edit on that article, this sums up the previous draft quite well. Also, anything not edited since January of 2014 is the old draft, too. I've committed most of the lore to memory (because my brain tends to remember this sort of thing for whatever reason) so I should be able to answer most questions." Alright, thanks. If I can't find something, I'll just ask you. "Leir, as mentioned even in the original draft before I retconned them as vanishing off the face of the earth, declines as a civilization so they are off the map. I can see Xeng sticking around until the modern era, but due to the magitek shortage and their rejection of the gods, they probably lost a lot of power and influence before they fully switched over to steam technology as an alternative source of energy. Present day Xeng would be sort of a spiritual successor in name, but likely to be far more modernized - sort of like the evolution from ancient Egypt to modern Egypt." I'm pretty sure most modern Egyptians are actually not related to the people of Ancient Egypt. Like, the vast majority of Europeans are descended from Arabic people who settled there after the Byzantine Empire conquered the place. So, it's Egypt in that the country is physically located in the same place as the original Egypt, but they're not really the same. Maybe Xeng would be more like China, being a more modernized version of an ancient society with very little political connection to the original. I mean, Xeng is already pretty China inspired, at least in nomenclature. "As for the Ascensores, I'd say they still could have been founded during the magitek era. If I recall, it was during a time when dragonmen rode the dragons, so maybe during the ekati shortage as magic begun to disappear, their friendship and alliance (it was between Sky Dragonmen and Shadow Dragons) fell apart until it resulted in the prejudices of today. The wording of the original lore suggested that the Xeng Empire predates the Ascensores by 2,000 years, although they were still contemporaries (Nra made a very specific reference to the Xeng empire in the original article if I recall)." I dunno about that. The whole point of Ascensores is that it was founded as a way for draconic races to overcome mutual prejudice and turn to overcoming prejudice from other races. It was also meant to be a recent creation, although recent is a more relative term given that we're now doing stories set at multiple points in time. It's something like Israel. I'd rather have Ascensores be founded a few decades before the events of Mask of Bara. "Pretty much, I can see most of the original storyline being preserved rather than replaced. We could say that the old magic system (with the D&D style magic and all) doesn't work anymore due to most of the magitek civilizations using up 95% of all the world's ekati, so more subtle types of magic (like potion-making and alchemy) would be the last branches of magic to survive while the flashier magical abilities would have become lost arts and the stuff of legend. Maybe talk of these powerful wizards and magic casters among modern civilization is what spawned the legends of the Bargods for all I know. Alright, but how much of the original should we keep? Does the original magic system need to remain exactly as it is? After all, it is pretty D&D, and we might want to come up with something more original that ties in better to the use of ekati. Could we also maybe alter the whole United Plane thing a bit, possibly leave what happened back then up to interpretation? Maybe the recorded history of the world should just start with the Shattering, and some religions claim there was a world before that (similar to the myths of some Pueblo peoples)? "So the old lore continues to refer to the different continents (Eidyn, Khyorgan, Valorum) as different planes separate from each other metaphysically? What if during the magitek era, there were actually magical barriers between these continents that were put in place by the gods after the Shattering to keep mortals under control? Like say for the longest time, the people of Eidyn thought the world was flat because the horizon seemed to end, and no one could figure out how to pass these barriers, and one could only travel past them through special magical techniques or something. So they thought they were different planes when in fact, they were all part of the same world, just invisible to one another. And in the new world we see today, the war started by Leir and the shortage of ekati would have caused these barriers to disappear as there was no longer enough magic to keep them powered up, thus fully revealing the entire world of Erudite as it is. This could explain why these magitek societies were not world-spanning and only covered specific areas, while the modern era has more cultural exchange and intercontinental travel." This feels like a forced retcon. Is there a point to this besides not having to edit a bunch of pages which are going to be irrelevant when we eventually finish moving to the new site? Do we ever actually establish that magitek societies don't have a lot of cultural exchange and intercontinental travel? And what do you mean by world-spanning? In a lot of ways, our modern societies are more advanced than the magitek ones, yet at present, no one is trying to take over the world (except maybe Vladimir Putin). I feel like a balance of power would be in place that prevents any one nation from getting to uppity, a balance of power which gets upset when Leir tries to conquer a bunch of people. Honestly, I just don't like this idea - it feels really contrived and adds nothing. So as not to clutter the comments section, I think we should move this discussion to the forums. Here's the link: http://erudite-tales.wikia.com/wiki/Thread:5147